It lingered there to touch your hair and walk with me

Ahead of our visit my parents were anxious that we have plenty of stuff to do. I understand that. I'm like that when I expect to host someone too. But the thing was I just didn't want to do much, and bunny_hugger didn't either. We were still barely two weeks out from our rabbit's death and were still barely getting through days without crying much. And while it's hard to say I suspect I'd have wanted to not do much even if our pet rabbit were alive and well and staying with bunny_hugger's parents. December had seen plenty of stuff to run us ragged. Some of it was unavoidable like my work trip; some of it was stuff that we didn't want to miss. But it did mean we'd gone weeks without a day that could just be spent sitting on the couch watching TV and not having anything we didn't want to do with the world.

So it was a bit lucky that my mother had a cold. To call it a cold understates it. She had one of those infections that works by clobbering you between a set of four 500-pound padded foam tubes and then leaves your every muscle in pain. She spent the day we arrived in bed, and nearly all the next day too. And I do feel awful for her about that. But it also meant that doing anything too elaborate was unlikely. Some of the more terrifyingly involved prospects, like driving to a plantation in Savannah(?), two hours off, were off unless we really insisted on going.

No need; we were happy to stay in, catch up on e-mail and stuff, and watch that History Channel documentary-I-guess about guys trying to dig up the Money Pit treasure of Oak Island. I discovered that show while in New Jersey and boy but every episode is even better than the last, even when you consider they suggested that hey, maybe there were some lost Shakespeare manuscripts in there. Of course there are, boys, now go play outside.

My father had to head out for a checkup, and he did so without telling us what the wireless password was. So we had to wake my mother and learn what it was, and that it was one of those things that we might in principle have guessed except that we didn't imagine my parents would use that as inspiration for their password. I'll leave it at that. I felt awful waking my mother like that, but then she shared it, explained it, and passed out again without getting out of bed.

Despite the smacking she'd taken from her cold --- and our worries that we'd get it, or especially that bunny_hugger would get it going into the first week of classes (she didn't) --- my mother did get up for a few things. Supper, mostly. She'd made a vegan chili in the slow cooker, something that was much more based on sweet potatoes than beans or whatnot. Incredibly filling and yet something we could keep on eating apparently without limit. My mother described how to make it and it seemed very easy to, and yet we haven't replicated it ourselves. We should.

Anyway, thanks to my mother's cold we had a day not just free of doing anything but free of the feeling that we ought to be doing something. We could just be where we were, which we needed.

Trivia: In the game of ``drive ball'' two players face each other with bats, taking turns striking a ball back and forth. Each player hits the ball from where it's retrieved, with the objective being to gain ground on the opponent, by hitting the ball farther away or by catching it sooner.
Source: Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, David Block. (And this does sound like a good game to me; I'm surprised I've never heard of anyone playing or reinventing it.)

Currently Reading: A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck, Roger Ebert. Getting into the era of movies I've also heard described on The Flophouse podcast, too.